Today we run into a little issue with FileMaker Server and our plugin. We have a server with MacOS and our MBS FileMaker Plugin installed. Now we replaced the plugin file with a new version and want to the newer version with the server. But how?

We started in Admin Console for FileMaker and disabled MBS Plugin. Enabled it again and well, the old plugin is back, even if newer file is in Extensions folder!
Same when we disable plugins for script engine. When we enable again, the same plugin becomes active. Seems like FileMaker Script Engine doesn't really try to unload and load again the plugin.

What works is to use Terminal and the command "fmsadmin restart fmse". This will restart the scripting engine and consequently end all running scripts. But it will reload the plugin from disk and you get the new version.
Alternatively you can of course just restart your server machine or restart the whole FileMaker Server, but that would kill all connections.

By the way, the console app is used to show /Library/FileMaker Server/Logs/stderr as this is a place where the log messages from MBS Plugin show up. Our plugin writes a message on startup as well as any requested trace messages.

Today CURL library and command line tool turns 21 years old. It's a long time in software business and a great success with curl on nearly every computer device on earth as it ships for example with MacOS, Google Chrome, Linux, Android and others.

Since January 2007 and the MBS Xojo Plugin 7.0, we do include CURL for up- and download via ftp/http.

Marco Bambini and his team worked hard on an update to their products CubeSQL Server, SQLiteManager and SQLiteDoctor.

During the past months we worked hard in order to renew the look and the functionalities of SQLabs and of all its products. We are extremely proud to announce a complete website renovation and products updates.

To celebrate the new updates we are offering a time limited, huge discount for all our products.

Xojo Inc. changed the name of the license option called Enterprise to Xojo Pro Plus.

As you see, it includes Top Priority Support, so you get quicker answers from Xojo's support staff. Your messages and feedback cases should get priority to be read first. Fast Fixes are included, so your problems are not just read, but also bugs fixed and workarounds found to help your app to work. 2X Activations allows you to install Xojo on up to 6 computers or virtual machines. This is very handy to install Xojo Pro on Linux, MacOS and Windows VMs and activate Xojo there, so you can build and test easily on each machine.

Anyone who invests into Xojo Pro Plus licenses, should also consider to go to the Xojo Developer Conferences and talk directly to Xojo staff. Geoff Perlman will be at the conferences in Miami in May and in Cologne in October.

A lot of companies need PDF/A for long term archiving. PDF/A should make a barrier-free accessible documents possible after 100 years. Thats because of the tree structure of the elements, which makes it possible to open the document in the future with a screen reader application and it looks the same like 100 years ago when it was created. All fonts and color profiles are embedded to the PDF Document, so no external dependencies cause trouble.

I want to show how you can do it with our MBS Plugin in FileMaker and DynaPDF.

In our example layout we have two container. One with the name Input for the PDF to process and one with the name Output for the result. You can insert a PDF file by putting your document into the Input container via Drag & Drop. We add a button which calls the following script:

Third-Party Tools: Updater Kit
Christian demonstrates his MBS Updater Kit plugin which adds crossplatform self-updating capability to your REALbasic applications.Easy Charts and Graphs (Part 1)
Christian shows how easy it is to create amazing charts and graphs using his ChartDirector plugin for REALbasic.Easy Charts and Graphs (Part 2)
Christian shows how easy it is to create amazing charts and graphs using his ChartDirector plugin for REALbasic.Making RB Plugins
Have you ever wondered how to make a plugin for REALbasic? Christian adapts his talk from the 2009 RB Summit and provides us with an overview of the process.RB Summit 2009
In September Geoffrey attended the RB Summit in Boulder, Colorado, and he provides us with his report.

It's still a great way to read the articles about ChartDirector. We plan a few new articles this year, but this free PDF should be in everyone's Xojo library. Download here

We'll add new function for next plugin release to plan a route for MapView functions:
So when you need to show a route on a map or get the steps, you can use our new MapView.PlanRoute function. Depending on the options, it can show the route, alternative routes as lines on the map, the start and end point as pins. Optionally we can zoom to show the route centered on the map. We can also return the information for the route as JSON blocks, so you can see the locations we found, the steps of the routes and if needed all the points on the map on the route.

I want to congratulate you again on such a great plugin. MBS FileMaker Plugin has transformed our solutions into no-compromise tools. It gives a way to answer when we say... "Could that be possible?"... and yes it is when we employ the plugin. Also what I love is I don't have to employ many plugins into a solution. It has all things considered and provides each one thoroughly. I especially love the extras stuff it can do with images and containers. I used to use command line tools with Image Magick and Graphics Magic and hope that I could get FileMaker to play nice. However, your plugin has streamlined the process. Thanks again ☺ Chris Johnston

When you scan images from a flatbed scanner or document feeder, you may get a collection of image files, one for each page. Than you may want to join them as a big PDF document and you may prefer skipping white pages.

In my script I scan the pages with our WIA.Scan function and get the list of picture file paths from WIA.Images function. The path is stored at $paths variable in the sample script below. In the following loop I use GMImage.NewFromFile function to load the image file into memory and get back the reference number for the image. This image is converted (if necessary) to the RGB colorspace with GMImage.SetType function. This is a necessary condition for the GMImage.AveragePixelValue function. It calculates the average pixel value and depending of the image content it is more black (0.0) or white (1.0). The function also need the dimensions of the region that should be tested. I want to test the whole page and simply pass the whole image size, queried via GMImage.GetWidth and GMImage.GetHeight functions.

A perfect white page would have an average pixel value of 1.0. But scanners usually do not scan perfect white pages, because dust pollutes the scan result. So we need to test against a little bit smaller value like 0.999.

We got notice from Norman, that he left Xojo Inc. and is now looking for new projects or jobs related to Xojo:

Norm Palardy, formerly Senior Developer at Xojo Inc., has become available if anyone is looking for additional resources to add to their development efforts.
After spending nearly 11 years at Xojo he is now seeking other opportunities to work with talented engineers and product specialists to make those designs come to life.

You may have met at the various Xojo conferences, read his articles in the Xojo Developer Magazine and he is one of the top posters on the Xojo forums. He knows Xojo in-and-out and could certainly help to move a project forward.

Nickenich, Germany - (March 12th, 2019) -- MonkeyBread Software today is pleased to announce MBS FileMaker Plugin 9.1 for macOS, iOS, Linux and Windows, the latest update to their product that is easily the most powerful plugin currently available for FileMaker Pro. As the leading database management solution for Windows, macOS, iOS and the web, the FileMaker Pro Integrated Development Environment supports a plugin architecture that can easily extend the feature set of the application. MBS FileMaker Plugin 9.1 has been updated and now includes over 5700 different functions, and the versatile plugin has gained more new functions:

For iOS we got new DocumentPicker functions to show the standard panel to import or open files. You can specify file types and get a script trigged when the choice is made.

When you edit a layout in FileMaker on MacOS, you may notice that the contextual menu to select object style is not sorted. The MBS Plugin can now sort the contextual menu entries alphabetically for you. For the export dialog, you can leave your mouse over a field and our plugin can show via tooltip what type a field has.

If users ask you to implement scrolling though records via mouse wheel, please check the FM.MouseWheelScriptTrigger function. You can get a script triggered to move through records for both MacOS and Windows.

Our AVRecorder functions got an upgrade for Windows, where you can now set the video encoder to use. You can show the standard configure dialog and setup streams, camera controls, and video compression configuration.

DynaPDF got functions to handle optional content in PDF documents (layers). You can query layers, show or hide them and save the new PDF. Table cells can have an action attached for mouse clicks. When printing PDFs with DynaPDF.Print function, you can provide a maximum resolution. The DynaPDF.ReplacePattern function can change text color and WriteFText functions can run in plain text mode.

This version includes three new remarkable example databases:

IMAP Email shows how import emails via IMAP from server into FileMaker and even shows a preview of the email.

Events Sync shows how to synchronizes events in FileMaker with the Calendar database for MacOS.

Scan with WIA to PDF shows how to scan images on Windows from your flatbed or document feeder scanner and convert them to a PDF/A.

To help scanning, you can now use ImageCapture.PDF function to query a PDF document with the images scanned on MacOS. For Windows the WIA.Images provides a list of image files to further process them.

Nickenich, Germany - (March 12th, 2019) -- MonkeyBread Software today is pleased to announce MBS Xojo Plugins 19.1 for macOS, Linux and Windows, the latest update to their product that is easily the most powerful plugin collection currently available for Xojo. MBS Xojo Plugins have been updated and now includes over 2400 classes and 64000 documented features, and the versatile plugins have gained more new functions:

As you may know we have an existing BigNumberMBS class which provides a 320-bit floating point number. The new LargeNumberMBS class adds an integer with up to 4128 bits in size. That is enough bits for 1200 digits. You can generate big prime numbers, use normal math operators and bitwise operations.

Our DirectShow classes for recording video on Windows got upgraded. We now have a DirectShowAMVideoCompressionMBS class to configure video compression settings. Several classes got a ShowPropertyDialog method to show the standard configure dialog, so you can setup streams, camera controls, and video compression.

For SceneKit we added 28 new classes to handle basic geometry in 3D scenes, add actions, constrains and materials. We got a few nice example projects to show you how to construct items in 3D space and display them to the user.

The older NSUserNotificationMBS class got deprecated, so we added UNNotificationMBS and related classes for notifications on MacOS 10.14 or newer. This includes actions in the notifications, so user can respond directly.

For GraphicsMagick we got a new class to convert images threaded: GMConvertMBS and GM16ConvertMBS classes have properties for which image to load, what effect to apply and where to save it. As this works with preemptive threads, you can do various image operations in parallel to batch process a lot of images. Similar CGImageSourceMBS.CreateThumbnailMT method can create thumbnails using MacOS frameworks threaded.

The new TextConverterMBS class converts between various text encodings, we got new UTF-8 related functions for StringHandleMBS class, we upgraded StoreKit classes for MacOS 10.14 with new subscription methods. For Linux we got a new LinuxIconMBS module to query file icons. For Windows we can now query all hard linked files to a given file path and TimerMBS class got an enabled property.

A client recently asked how to send text messages (SMS) via iMessage. Instead of using a web service of some provider, he only has to occasionally send a few messages automated over his iPhone. So we got the following AppleScript for him:

propertytargetPhone : ""

propertytargetMessage : ""

onrun

tellapplication "Messages"

settargetServiceto 1stservicewhoseservice type = iMessage

settargetBuddytobuddytargetPhoneoftargetService

sendtargetMessagetotargetBuddy

endtell

endrun

This script has two properties for the phone number (or email) and the message to send. The script asks Messages app on MacOS for the first service for iMessage and for the buddy with the given phone number. Than it sends a message to the buddy.

For the MBS Xojo Conference in Europe, we may have something special for people staying a bit longer. Especially our guests from the USA are probably coming for a week, so we organize an extra sight seeing special.

For 22nd October, we'll organize a guided private tour to the roof of the cathedral (or with bad weather to the underground or backstage parts). We can invite up to 15 people for the tour. Let us know if you are interested to join us.

Participants need to be 16 year old. They do have a cargo lift, but if it's not available or broken that day, we may need to take the 240 steps to walk up. Please sign up for the conference, make your hotel reservation and let us know whether you have time. Same evening we may go for dinner after the tour. Start time is probably around 15:30 o'clock at the hotel.

Sometimes you may want to show a website in a webviewer, but a login is required. We solved this for a client today with the following script. First we go by script to the website. If we have to login, there is a login form, so we set the user name and password. If the field is not found, we are logged in and exit the script. Otherwise we click the login button and continue to the final website:

Next user can do a search and find information to use in the FileMaker solution. If needed, our plugin can assist to extract text or html live content from the web viewer as well as query content of certain DOM elements via JavaScript (see WebView.RunJavaScript) . In case the website changes layout, you may need to adjust the script with new form and field names.